On the Relationship Between and

Theory, Measurement, and Early Evidence for the Psychological Mechanism

Dissertation Defense

Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Rizqy Amelia Zein

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mario Gollwitzer

Chair of Social Psychology, LMU Munich

Theoretical Background

  • Barbour’s Taxonomy (Barbour, 1966, 1998, 2000, 2002) assumes that people can perceive and as:
    • Conflict: inherently incompatible, then cannot mentally coexist.
    • Independence: separate domains or non-overlapping magisteria (Gould, 1999)
    • Dialogue: distinct but incomplete without each other.
    • Integration: a unified belief system with no categorical distinction.
  • Assumptions: The qualitative distinctions between taxons are delicate and they are situation-dependent characterstics (Barbour, 2002).
  • Perceptions of the relationship between and is hereby defined as a mental schema for processing potentially competing explanations and is expected to predict how people interpret, evaluate, and respond to situations in which both scientific and religious explanations are salient.
  • For brevity, I will refer to this construct as ‘mental models’ later on.

Research Questions

Does Barbour’s taxonomy exist in reality? If so, why do people differ in their mental models?

The goal is to illustrate the underlying psychological mechanisms responsible for the formation of the mental models.

Pillar 1: Theory

If it exists, how can one systematically operationalize it for empirical research?

The goal is to quantify qualitative distinctions of the mental models.

Pillar 2: Measure

Then, what does it predict?

The goal is to investigate whether the mental models can predict how people evaluate the utility of specific scientific and religious explanations.

Pillar 3: Mechanistic Testing

Pillar : Theory

Some Insights

Is the taxonomy real?

  • There is handful of evidence from qualitative studies for Barbour’s taxonomy, mostly in learning sciences, but they are by and large fragmented.
  • Mental models have different names but the most straightforward are suggested by Yasri, Arthur, Smith, & Mancy (2013), which are Conflict, Compartment (= Independence), Complementary (= Dialogue) and Consonance (= Integration).
  • Context-Switch is a new variant (Shipman, Brickhouse, Dagher, & Letts, 2002; Taber, Billingsley, Riga, & Newdick, 2011; Yasri & Mancy, 2012), which represents a pragmatic strategy of an underlying conflict belief by flexibly switching between and depending on the social situation or demands.

Why people differ?

Pillar : Measurement

Rationale

  • There have been some efforts to operationalize Barbour’s taxonomy 1, but they did not satisfy Barbour’s most important assumption: fuzzy boundaries between the mental models.
  • Ultimately, is Barbour’s taxonomy testable at all?
  • One way to operationalize it is to assume that mental models don’t only differ in their kind but also in their degree of conflict – compatibility.

Rationale

  • There have been some efforts to operationalize Barbour’s taxonomy 1, but they did not satisfy Barbour’s most important assumption: fuzzy boundaries between the mental models.
  • Ultimately, is Barbour’s taxonomy testable at all?
  • One way to operationalize it is to assume that mental models don’t only differ in their kind but also in their degree of conflict – compatibility.
  • We developed a novel measure that mirrors theoretical and empirical descriptions of mental models
  • ..and assumed that people would respond to the scale items by following an unfolding (Thurstone) response process (Carter, Lake, & Zickar, 2010; Roberts, 2018).
  • To test these assumptions, we performed one pilot and three studies across three German (N = 2,920) and one U.S. sample (N = 1,197).
  • Since mental models are culturally embedded (C. Johnson, Thigpen, & Funk, 2020; Rios & Aveyard, 2019; Rios & Roth, 2020), the scale might carry the risk of systematic cultural bias.
  • Discriminant and convergent validity were also scrutinized.

Results

Pillar : Mechanistic Testing

What Have We Learned?

Conclusion
  • Pillar : People’s perceptions on the relationship between and emerge through identifiable psychological (i.e., cognitive and motivational) processes.
  • Pillar : These perceptions, conceptualized as “the mental models”, are mapped on to different regions of a unidimensional, bipolar construct, which is deeply embedded in the culture.
    • But, we found that the Context-Switch is closer to compatibility than conflict.
  • Pillar : …and they predict how people evaluate the utility of religious, but not scientific, explanations.
Contributions
  • Avoiding framing science as being antithetical to when delivering science comms to religious audiences
Limitations
  • Avoiding framing science as being antithetical to when delivering science comms to religious audiences

Thank you! ✨

Where to go from here?

  • Do mental models predict how people change/update their scientific/religious beliefs?
  • Are models stable characteristics or situation-dependent? What are the boundary conditions?
  • What are boundary conditions related to the mental models? (e.g., uncertainty? death-related events? threatened social identity?)
  • Can we improve the practical use of the developed measure?
  • Could the models play a role on people’s decisions on various aspects of their life? (e.g., public-health/sustainability-related decision making, etc.)
  • Could science communication strategy be personalized based on one’s preferred model? If so, would it be practically useful?
Project Supported by:

References

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